Unpackaged Open Font of the Week: Blackout

Blackout is a decorative typeface that uses filled-in sans-serif lettering with a little bit of a grungy feel. Tyler Finck developed the font for his homepage / portfolio which is also a great example treatment of the typeface. It’s a bold and attention-grabbing typeface but it also has some attitude, so you could use it on posters to get people’s attention from far away, or you could also use it in limited doses around any kind of composition for a little bit of spice.🙂

Do you want to help and don’t know how to package? Or is the font-packaging process too complicated?

Do you just not care about fonts and would rather see packaging needs highlighted for some other type of thing? (I recently discovered there’s a lot of great audio apps that we don’t have packaged yet!)

Please let me know, because I need to decide if I should keep doing this. My goal here is twofold: I want folks to see what awesome openly-licensed stuff is out there to use, but I also want to show folks very specific, well-defined, and not too-overwhelming ways they can jump in and help further free & open source projects – packaging content for use in a distro is a great way to do that.

When you package fonts and help me out, I see the love, but when I don’t see stuff getting packaged, I feel sad!

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About Máirín Duffy

Máirín is a principal interaction designer at Red Hat. She is passionate about software freedom and free & open source tools, particularly in the creative domain: her favorite application is Inkscape. You can read more from Máirín on her blog at blog.linuxgrrl.com.

Discussion

15 thoughts on “Unpackaged Open Font of the Week: Blackout”

I’ve really enjoyed the posts and downloaded the fonts. I don’t care too much about Fedora packaging🙂 But, I think it’s worthwhile to highlight this content. Especially with fonts, there is a bunch out there but the licensing is murky, it’s great to see good fonts with great licensing.

I’ve talked to many of the authors of the fonts I’ve highlighted though, either to confirm the license or to make the case for a more open license, and they’ve all been completely amenable. So if there is some licensing trickiness many font authors don’t mind reconsidering at all, you only need ask and I’m happy to do that.

Please keep posting. We need those posts! It was an terrific breadth of fresh air when you started.

If the caveats section scares people away, I will remove it. It was never intended to scare people, just provide helpful tips to help packaging fonts quickly.

I agree the licensing part is usually the hardest one. Unfortunately, it is also the font author choice, not something Fedora can do anything about.

It would help a lot if an authoritative organisation like the FSF spent the time needed to write or back up a license for fonts everyone could use without afterthought (the OFL is close but SIL has not got the clout of the FSF and people feel it is not as rigorously checked as FSF licenses).

Maybe it would help if in addition to font presentations Máirín or someone else good at communication evangelized good font legal practices?

It seems to me that manually packaging fonts is a waist of time. There are only finitely many variations, either they should be handled outside the packaging system in some sort of Library with hooks in the package system for apps that depend on certain ones or a brazillian automated packages should be generated from a script pointing at a database external to the packaging repo.

Please don’t stop highlighting the open fonts that are out there, at whatever interval you think is appropriate.

I’ve recently started looking at creating fonts again after a long absence, largely as a result of your posts and reading the Fonts SIG pages on the wiki. As far as packaging goes, I’d welcome an example of a recently-packaged font that gets a big thumbs up for properly using the most recent packaging templates. I learn by copying full examples even better than I do from templates.

We are currently trying to put together a RPM repo for Fedora, packaging tools which aren’t packaged by either Fedora or RPMFusion. The idea is to get packaged software to Fedora users and push as many (within the eligible criteria) into the main Fedora repos. We have a few slight hiccups, but your suggestions are in our ‘to watch’ list. How many we could package might depend on a few things.

If only you didn’t feature the Mana World recently, I’d have more free time to work on packaging.🙂